In the sale of equipment, companies such as lenders typically lose significant capital when purchasers fail to make timely payments. While the purchaser is delinquent in its payments, the purchaser has possession of the equipment and can productively use the equipment to its benefit. At the same time, however, although the lending company may penalize the purchaser by charging a late finance fee for the missed payment, the lending equipment company has no certainty of when—or whether—the purchaser will pay.
Several patents directed to the gaming industry disclose systems and methods for “pre-paying a set sum” to be used for playing a gaming machine or placing a wager. For example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,902,983 and 6,347,738, the latter being a continuation, Crevelt et al. disclose an electronic funds transfer (EFT) system for gaming machines. The gaming machines include apparatus necessary for sending requests to and receiving authorizations from the EFT system. The requests for credit are limited to a pre-set amount, so that when a player uses an EFT transfer to obtain playing credit, the credit will be limited to no more than a specified amount. In practice, the player inserts his or her ATM card (debit card), keys in a PIN number, requests playing credit, and receives the pre-set amount of credit which can be converted to “plays” on the gaming machine.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,580,310, Orus et al. disclose gaming machines having mechanical counters according to the regulations. Grafted onto the mechanical counters are electronic payment mechanisms that work on the basis of a chip card. The electronic payment mechanism diverts a certain number of links of the units of the machine to enable wagers to be placed and payments to be made through the chip card, without the receiving or issuing of tokens and, preferably, without the modifying of the contents of the TOTAL IN and TOTAL OUT counters. A downgraded version modifies the contents of these counters, and the balance of the feeder box containing the coins is obtained by modifying the formula used to compute this balance.
These systems and methods, however, are targeted for the gaming industry where an ATM card or a chip card is used directly or in conjunction with the gaming machine. Moreover, neither discloses the monitoring of the timeliness of payments made on an account. Nor do these references disclose or suggest a method that inactivates equipment when payments are not made or are late.
Thus, there exists a need for a system and method that monitors a credit account from the sale or leasing of equipment and that renders the purchased or leased equipment unusable when the account falls in arrears.